eReading in 2024: How the Kindle & iPad Canceled My Paperback Purchases
How the Kindle and iPad made me go paper-free in my reading journey and why you should think about taking eReading seriously too.
🫣 Introduction
Just yesterday, I was in a bookstore looking for… nothing in particular. Just glancing at new book titles and searching for something that could catch my attention. Usually, when I find a book in a bookstore that catches my attention, I quickly search it up on the Amazon store or an e-library store and add it to my eBooks cart. I have done this for the last four years since I started taking my Kindle seriously.
But yesterday, was different.
For the first time in years, I decided to buy a paperback. Well, two paperback books. I got them for a good deal and buying paperbacks felt good for a change.
That’s until I started reading them later that night. I quickly realized why I spent the last few years reading only on my Kindle and iPad. Paperbacks got me nostalgic in the bookstore but the inconvenience of reading them reminded me of everything wrong with them.
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📖 Why Paperback doesn’t work for me…
The year was 2020 — the year when a virus outbreak caused a pandemic forcing us all to stay safe within four walls. For me, that year was the year of experimentation. I read close to 70 books that year about which I wrote in the past.
Apart from the status quo physical books I had been purchasing, I tried out audiobooks and eBooks too. While audiobooks became a staple part of my routine during the lockdown — listening to them day and night, they soon vanished when I got busy with college semester work.
Audiobooks were soon replaced by white noise and some other ‘Study-with-Me’ music on my headphones as I worked on semester assignments and studied for exams.
However, what did stay was eBooks. My Kindle became the centerpiece of attention as I downloaded a ton of ebooks on it. This obsession with ebooks only became wilder when I got my iPad Air at the end of that year.
The whole abstinence from paperbacks happened gradually throughout 2020 and for three simple reasons:
1. The Waiting… 📦📬
There are two ways of getting a physical copy of the book you want to read — either you walk into the nearest bookstore (or a farther one, if they don’t have your book) or simply order online from sites like Amazon.
In both ways, there is a certain amount of waiting period — ranging from a few minutes to a few days. Either way, you waste time acquiring the book. In comparison, it takes less than a minute to purchase an ebook copy of the same book.
2. The difficulty of highlighting and taking notes 📝
I have tried many painstaking ways of taking notes and saving them for future reference while reading a paperback.
I have tried keeping a Readers’ Journal for writing down the highlighted notes from the books. This simply felt like a waste of time as I kept writing down longer and longer notes in the journal without reflecting on them.
I also tried turning this process digital by dedicating a page in my Notion workspace for Book Highlights and Notes but this again felt tiresome.
Finally, I turned to Readwise. The Readwise app has a highlight-collecting feature where you can simply point the camera of your phone to the book highlight and the OCR does somewhat of a great job at turning that to a saved highlight in the app.
While the last option was great it did have its flaws. Sometimes the OCR didn’t work as intended and there would be mistakes that I would have to manually correct later on.
And then after finding a better alternative (that we shall discuss next), even pointing the camera at the book felt a bit… archaic.
3. “Don’t turn off the light… “ 🤝 “This book weighs a ton!”
Those are some of the best complaints I have heard from a paperback reader. Including me.
The inconvenience of having the lights on while reading during bedtime, while your roommate/partner curses you in their mind is simply abysmal. For your sleep schedule and your relationships.
Also, carrying and reading a 500+ page book is more of an exercise for your arms than your brain. If you plan on reading one such book at night in bed, you better decide on a sleeping position well in advance since you are going to need a good recovery from that tough night workout.
These three reasons pushed me away from paperbacks gradually and my ship sailed across the great ocean of ebooks and audiobooks until I reached the shore of Kindle eBooks and Apple Books.
📠 Why Kindle?
If you have been observant enough, you might have noticed the emojis with every heading and sub-heading in this article. The current one has a fax machine with it. Because I believe the Kindle is very much like a Fax Machine.
In the World of Reading, a Kindle is not too gaudy and complicated like a smartphone or tablet but at the same time, it’s not as archaic as a mailbox either. It’s somewhere in between just like a fax machine — offering you just what you need to get the intended task done without distractions or a long waiting time.
Kindles come with an e-ink display that doesn’t bother your eyes too much even when you read on it at night. There is no color display on Kindle so the monochromatic display is sure to save you from any possible harmful blue light. Kindles are just the perfect companion for bedtime reading.
Second of all, they are extremely light. I have a pop socket on the back of my Kindle for a better grip while reading. This has made my reading experience only better since then as I just have to use a single finger to hold the Kindle from the back.
Also, no matter how many books you have on your Kindle device, it is always going to way somewhere around 200 grams. Even War and Peace!
Kindle Highlights and Notes make the whole Kindle experience even more worth the money. If you have purchased your books from Amazon directly then the notes and highlights appear directly on the Kindle Highlights page.
However, there is also a local file known as “My Clippings.txt” on your Kindle that keeps track of all highlights and notes from the downloaded books you read (whether purchases from Amazon or elsewhere). You can connect your Kindle to your PC/Mac and copy the ‘My Clippings’ file to your computer.
This is a text file that isn’t well-formatted for reading and searching through your highlights so you need to use some other app to reformat the highlights and notes.
There are some apps like Readwise (paid subscription) and Obsidian (free; but uses an extension) where you can import this file and view all your Kindle highlights and notes in a much better-formatted way. Readwise also allows you to export all your Kindle Highlights and Notes to your Notion Workspace, if you are willing to pay for a subscription.
Purchasing books on Kindle is always super easy. You can either buy from the Kindle Store or borrow an ebook copy from your local library (in certain countries).
You can also try out a bunch of other Archive websites that have some popular classics available to download for free in ‘.epub’ format. You can then use the ‘Send to Kindle’ service on your smartphone or PC to directly send the epub copy of the book to your Kindle device.
📚📲 The Apple Books x iPad love affair
Everything was sweet sailing for me on the shore of Kindle until I purchased my first-ever iPad. It wasn’t meant to be my reading device but rather just a note-taking device for college lectures.
This was surprising for me too. The iPad negated all the advantages the Kindle brought — it was neither light in hand nor exactly monochromatic to save my eyes from the blue light flare.
But as it is, love strikes like lightning to anyone, anywhere, anytime, and soon enough, I was using my iPad for reading. And I think, Apple Books is partially to blame for this love affair!
Apple Books is not at all perfect. Apple hasn’t worked on it actively in the past few years for any major redesign or overhaul. But there have been subtle changes over the years that have made it somewhat of a parallel experience to reading a physical book. The first and foremost being the page-turn animation on the Books app — Insanely Great!
The Books app also allows you to set Reading Goals — a daily reading goal as well as a yearly reading goal. You can set the daily reading goal to whatever amount of time (minutes per day) you want to read and the yearly reading goal to how many ever number of books you want to finish reading by the end of the year. The user interface and experience are extremely simple to get started with.
You can also add new custom collections for different genres, authors, or publishers and move your books to these collections accordingly. Apart from these, the Books app already has the Library tab showing you the books you want to read, have finished reading, your Audiobooks, PDFs, and samples.
But what about the highlights and notes of the books you are reading? Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t have any dedicated webpage or tab within the app for your highlights and notes. This is why I said earlier that Apple hasn’t focused on this app for a long time. However, other apps can help you out here.
Klib is a Mac-exclusive app that you can install from the Mac App Store. This one allows you to import all your Apple Books highlights and notes with just one click of a button, with the free version of the app. You can then view the highlights and notes from different books on Klib and even export them as markdown files.
The only caveat is that you need to have iCloud Sync turned on for the Books app so that the books on your iPad and Mac can sync.
PS: The premium subscription of Klib allows you to sign in to your Amazon account and import your Kindle books’ (purchased from Amazon) highlights and notes to the app.
While the Books app offers a great reading experience on the iPad, I feel the Kindle app on the iPad is more refined. Kindle being a product of Amazon has a larger collection of ebooks in their store and has more frequent updates from Amazon than Apple does for the Books app.
Though the reading experience is somewhat the same on both apps, overall the Kindle app on iPad is a much better reading app.
However, bibliophiles are never just happy with their reading app or device. They need a progress tracker too. The two best ones I know of, personally are GoodReads and StoryGraph.
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🧑💻📊 GoodReads & Storygraph: The bibliophile catalysts
In an earlier article, I mentioned quite a few reasons why GoodReads is one of the best reading progress trackers/journals and had even called it the Instagram for Book Lovers. In case you missed it, you can read about it here or save the article for a future read.
But since then I have discovered another app that works on some of the flaws I noticed with GoodReads.
- I noticed the rating system on GoodReads is a bit too primary allowing you to rate a book out of five and only allowing whole number ratings.
- Also, you can optionally review the book by writing about it in a text box. Users like me often use the star-rating system and skip this manual typing review option after we finish reading the book.
- GoodReads doesn’t offer much of a comprehensive view of the books you have read.
StoryGraph changes this story. It offers different views allowing you to look at the books you have read in a particular year or month and even classify them according to different stats like Mood & Pace, Length, Tags, Formats, Authors, Genres, Pages, and Ratings of the books you have read.
It also offers a much better star-rating system allowing you to rate the book you have read out of five — with whole numbers as well as fractions/decimals. Also, you can review the book more briefly with a short questionnaire they provide you and then leave additional thoughts if you wish to.
This way I believe StoryGraph will not provide enough incentive for readers to leave a short review but also have enough data to recommend books to other users in the future. It does something similar with the Recommendations tab on their app.
I use both apps to track my reading progress and I love both. Had I been asked a year before, I would have given the award to GoodReads for being the best reading progress tracker/journal. But now, it’s about time that StoryGraph gets this award — a much well-deserved app!
🤓 The Odds of Buying a Physical Book
But Hey! Didn’t I just say I bought a physical book yesterday? How hypocritical?
Not really.
Paperbacks have gradually disappeared from my reading life. However, there are some moments where I prefer a paperback over an ebook. When there are graphics in the book or books written like guides that involve more of an involvement of some kind such as filling in some blanks on the page, I prefer physical books.
These books are much better in hand than on an e-reader or an iPad.
Unless you wish to completely digitalise your reading process by annotating PDF guides (which I have done quite a few times), paperbacks are still a worthwhile option in my opinion for such types of books.
The odds of me buying a physical book have been close to none for the longest time but I don’t hesitate to buy one when I absolutely have to or need to.
Also for a long time, I always had a soft spot in my reading heart for leather-bound hardcover books. Especially, after watching my favourite author Brandon Sanderson’s video on how they are made, I always wanted to purchase hardcover copies of some of my favourite books.
Hopefully, someday when money is not a huge barrier, I shall do so but till then — eBooks & eReaders for the Win!
✌️Conclusion
eBooks have been my go-to for the past few years now.
Apart from saving me money, eReaders like Kindle also save a ton of power since they have much longer standby modes going up to weeks or even a month with active daily use.
Hence, they can be your first step towards achieving carbon neutrality as a reader, if you make the switch.
It’s still strange why other big companies like Apple or Google have not yet placed their bet on an eReader despite having an online bookstore and dedicated eBooks app on their devices.
While the iPad does offer a great reading experience, it is still far from the e-ink display offered by eReaders and the battery life they have.
For me, Kindle and iPad have enabled me to make the switch from the conventional way of reading.
While apps like GoodReads and StoryGraph have only helped me stay on track with my reading routine, some other great apps like Obsidian, Readwise, and Notion have helped me streamline the highlights and insights I had from each book.
Once you take your first few steps into the eReading journey, things only get better and more and more digitalised on the way. If you are thinking of taking your first step or are already on this journey, let me know what your thoughts are about the state of eReaders and eBooks in 2024.
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